곤지암

Ha-joon, leader of the YouTube horror channel Horror Times, plans an overnight live broadcast from the abandoned Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital, promising viewers the team will open the long-locked Room 402 if the stream reaches one million concurrent watchers. He recruits six participants — Korean locals Sung-hoon, Seung-wook, and Ji-hyun, plus Korean-American fan Charlotte, A-yeon, and one other woman — equips each with a head-mounted camera and radio, and runs the multi-feed broadcast from a control tent outside the building.

Unknown to most of the cast, Ha-joon, Sung-hoon, and Seung-wook have pre-rigged the wards with hidden props and remote-triggered effects — swinging doors, planted ritual objects, pre-recorded sounds — to manufacture paranormal activity on cue. Early scares land cleanly. The viewer count climbs, chat argues about authenticity, and Ha-joon pushes the group deeper into the peeling corridors toward Room 402.

Phenomena begin firing that nobody triggered. A wheelchair rolls in an empty hall. Doors slam without prompts. Equipment glitches in ways Ha-joon cannot account for from his console. A-yeon, separated from the others, is pursued through corridors that seem to rearrange behind her and returns hysterical; Ha-joon, fixated on viewer numbers, dismisses her and presses on. Crew members start showing nosebleeds and dizziness.

When some members try to retreat, every staircase routes them back to the same floor and the same numbered doors keep repeating. Ha-joon's monitors show their cameras in positions no floor plan can explain. Radio contact begins to break up.

Ha-joon abandons the tent and joins the remaining crew at Room 402. They cut the chain and force the door. Inside, one member is dragged into darkness by something off-camera; another stares blankly into a corner; another laughs in a voice that is no longer hers. The cameras catch pale, gowned figures standing inches behind their backs. A possessed crew member walks another into a treatment room, speaking flatly that the spirits want her to stay. Ha-joon turns to flee, but every passage he takes funnels him deeper. Cornered in a narrow service tunnel, he looks into the lens as something approaches; the feed cuts to black.

Live chat dismisses the broadcast as a staged hoax and the channel collapses rather than goes viral. None of the team is ever found. The final shot lingers on a dish of holy water the crew had set down earlier in an empty corridor, now slowly boiling on its own.